Byline: Rami Grunbaum; Seattle Times deputy business editor
Frederick Darren Berg, held in federal custody since October on charges of running a massive Ponzi scheme, wants to be released on bail so he can guide defense attorneys through the case's mountain of financial data.
His attorneys this week asked federal Judge Richard Jones to overturn earlier orders that have kept the former financier in the federal detention center in SeaTac. They assert the center's "grossly inadequate" computer access is interfering with his defense.
Berg is accused of diverting at least $100 million from his Meridian Mortgage real-estate partnerships, which were put into bankruptcy last summer.
The prosecution has provided Berg's defense team "approximately 35 gigabytes" of digitized business records from Meridian, equal to about 1.75 million pages of written documents. He also needs access to "forensically preserved data from the hard drives of Mr. Berg's server and associated computers," which amounts to 400 times as much additional information, the filing says.
But the detention center provides only one computer that 100 detainees must share with no Internet connection or the financial software to work with the data, his attorneys wrote. Berg is the only one who can decipher the information and staying at the detention center makes that impossible, the filing says.
The U.S. Attorney's Office had no comment Friday. A hearing has not been set.
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